The Beater Watch: Build The Ultimate Watch Collection

The Beater Watch: Build The Ultimate Watch Collection

The ultimate beater watch: Casio G-Shock

Since the mid-‘70s, Casio emerged as a maker of clever, inexpensive digital watches. Remember the calculator watch? Yup, it was a Casio. In the early ‘80s, the company saw the growing sports watch market and set out to create the most durable watch possible. The concept the development team adopted was called the “Triple Ten” and meant that the watch should be able to survive a fall from a height of 10 meters (33 feet), be water resistant to a depth of 10 atmospheres of water pressure (the equivalent of 100 meters of depth) and have a battery life of 10 years. After numerous prototypes and destructive rounds of testing, in 1983, the Casio G-Shock was born.

The G-Shock has since become a cult classic, an object of desire for teenaged Japanese girls and Special Forces soldiers alike. Few watches have inspired such an impassioned following. Ironically, this love has inspired untold abuses. People have gone to great lengths to try to break a G-Shock — dropping them off of skyscrapers, running them over with cars, freezing them, boiling them. So what makes the G-Shock so durable? It’s all in the case.

The revolutionary concept that Casio pioneered with the G-Shock is the floating movement inside a urethane case. The digital watch movement makes contact with the case at very few points, in essence floating inside. This, combined with a thick urethane outer case, makes the watch highly resistant to shock damage. The entire watch is designed with protection in mind. Buttons are protected by large protrusions. The crystal is sunk deep below a heavy-browed (dare we say, Neanderthal?) bezel. All of this makes the watch incredibly durable. It also makes it incredibly ugly.

There is a G-Shock for nearly any use. Over 100 models are listed on the G-Shock website. Truth be told, any one of them would qualify as an ultimate beater watch. But let’s see how one model, the G9000-MC3 Mudman, lines up against our essential features list.

The Casio G9000-MC3 Mudman

Cheap: The Mudman can be had for as little as $50. At that price, buy four of them and keep one in your car, your gym bag, your desk drawer, and your toolbox.

Quartz: While many G-Shocks use Casio’s “Tough Solar” technology and are recharged by solar energy, the Mudman is run by a good old 3-volt lithium battery that should get you five years of accurate grab-and-go performance.

Multifunctional: The Mudman utilizes the vaunted 3031 digital module that has more functions than you’ll probably ever use. Ready for this? World time with 48 cities and 29 time zones preprogrammed, a sophisticated countdown timer that can be set to the second up to 24 hours, two stopwatch modes with elapses and split times, five alarms, from minute to monthly, and a backlight that can be set to turn on with a twist of your wrist in case your other hand is occupied. And the Mudman is one of the simpler G-Shocks.

Water resistant: The Mudman will survive a plunge to 200 meters, but better than that, it is designed to be mud-resistant, with extra heavy-duty seals around the push buttons. It is the cockroach of watches — apocalypse-proof.

Ugly: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we certainly don’t want to offend a legion of G-Shock fanatics. But with a camouflage strap, a bulbous 46mm case, lots of bold writing, and a digital display right out of a 1960s sci-fi film, the Mudman definitely meets our beater requirement in the looks department.

The Casio G-Shock is universally loved and a true legend, a watch that likes to be ridden hard and put away wet — the ultimate beater watch. It stands proudly alongside the Patek, the Rolex and the Lange in our pantheon of greats, whether the others like it or not. But an ultimate collection isn’t complete without it. And that shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone.